Dos & Don’ts for the design contest

The 2024 design competition is here, and we are on the hunt for the freshest design ideas of the year! Understanding these do’s and don’ts will greatly increase your chances of winning.

Do’s: 3 tips for your participation in the design contest

To get rated well and stand out against the numerous creative submissions, here are three things you should pay close attention to:

1. Your design should be unique

A design competition is all about your creativity and ideas! The use of stock photos and typography à la “Times New Roman” is therefore not recommended. You should also steer clear of other people’s ideas. Discover your own creative flair – that way you won’t be infringing any usage rights or other regulations.

We want to create the fairest possible conditions for everyone. Therefore, please submit a maximum of 1 design per contest.

Regarding AI designs: Trust your skills here too and don’t let the machine take over. Designs that we can clearly recognise as AI-generated will be excluded from the competition. However, you may use image generators for individual elements of your design. Just use them sparingly!

2. Use the keyword for your submission

To successfully take part, you must tag your design with the keyword of the current contest. You can find this on the contest page. Make sure you only enter the tag, without any special characters! So, if the tag of this year’s competition is exampledesigncontest2024, you must use it exactly as it is:

Right: exampledesigncontest2024

Wrong:

exampledesigncontest2024.

example Designcontest2024

example design contest 2024

and so on.

As we are looking for creative and, above all, new ideas, tagging designs that have already been uploaded will not count as a submission. Only designs uploaded during the contest period and tagged with the keyword will be considered in the contest.

3. Pay attention to the quality of your design

Take the time to check whether your competition design is of the necessary quality. This means: Is your design properly formatted, does it have sufficient resolution and the right contrast, etc.? You can find out more about the quality criteria here under the reasons for rejection.

Don’ts: The most common mistakes

The jury repeatedly encounters the same mistakes, so we have summarised the most common one’s for you here.

1. The design and product do not match

Here’s an example: We are looking for designs with the theme of school enrolment. You create a great graphic and publish it with the competition keyword – on a baby shirt. The problem is clear: babies don’t go to school yet! Your contest design and the chosen product don’t match.

The solution: Publish your design on a product suitable for children.

As you can see, sometimes less is more. Instead of publishing your design across the board on all sorts of products, you should carefully select the products that match the topic, the target group, and your design.

2. Your design does not fit the theme of the competition

Another example: The theme of the competition is “Vibrant colours”. You create a great graphic in black and white. Your design cannot win because it doesn’t fit to the theme. Another example is the Gothic Aesthetics Design Competition 2023: Submissions with images of cheerful elves, unicorns and colourful bubbles simply don’t fit in here (unless you design a very, very angry elf on a grumpy unicorn).

3. Your design is not well positioned

This error is very common! We also see it time and again on the marketplace, which is why you can take these tips to heart for your showroom in general.

The last example: You have created a detailed design on the theme of “Plants & Flowers” and place it as a tiny print on a T-shirt. Regardless of whether you do this by mistake or just cannot make your design larger because you have not formatted it correctly, in the end your design is not as effective as it could be and most likely won’t sell very well.

The contest procedure

You can read all about the process and your participation in the contest on the blog. You can also find answers to many questions in our FAQs.

Do you want to give free rein to your creativity in the 2024 design competition? Then visit our blog now and find out about the current competition theme.

See Current Contest